Plasma nanoDSF Denaturation Profile at Baseline Is Predictive of Glioblastoma EGFR Status

Cancers (Basel). 2023 Jan 26;15(3):760. doi: 10.3390/cancers15030760.

Abstract

Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most frequent and aggressive primary brain tumor in adults. Recently, we demonstrated that plasma denaturation profiles of glioblastoma patients obtained using Differential Scanning Fluorimetry can be automatically distinguished from healthy controls with the help of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Here, we used a set of machine-learning algorithms to automatically classify plasma denaturation profiles of glioblastoma patients according to their EGFR status. We found that Adaboost AI is able to discriminate EGFR alterations in GBM with an 81.5% accuracy. Our study shows that the use of these plasma denaturation profiles could answer the unmet neuro-oncology need for diagnostic predictive biomarker in combination with brain MRI and clinical data, in order to allow for a rapid orientation of patients for a definitive pathological diagnosis and then treatment. We complete this study by showing that discriminating another mutation, MGMT, seems harder, and that post-surgery monitoring using our approach is not conclusive in the 48 h that follow the surgery.

Keywords: biomarker; cancer; differential scanning fluorimetry; glioblastoma; machine learning; neuro-oncology; neurophysiopathology; plasma profiling.